The Marijuana Chronicles Read Free Page B

understood that yes, she was being exploited. No other customers on this rainy weekday night in the vicinity of the boarded-up train depot would pay so much. She was being laughed at. She was being eyed. She was being assessed. It was being gauged of her— Could we take all her money, could we take her car keys and her car, would she dare to report us? Rich bitch .
    She knew. She suspected. She was very frightened but she was very excited. She thought, I am the person who is here, this must be me. I can do this .
    She paid. Never any doubt but that the silver-haired lady would pay.
    And politely she said, for it was her nature to speak in such a way, after any transaction, Thank you so much!
    Self-medicating, you might call it.
    Though she hated the weakness implied in such a term— medicating!
    She wasn’t desperate. She wasn’t a careless, reckless, or stupid woman. If she had a weakness it was being suffused with hope .
    I need to save myself. I don’t want to die .
    Her hair! Her hair had turned, not overnight, but over a period of several distraught months, a luminous silver that, falling to her shoulders, parted in the center of her head, caused strangers to stare after her.
    Ever more beautiful she was becoming. Elegant, ethereal.
    After his death she’d lost more than twenty pounds.
    His death she carried with her. For it was precious to her. Yet awkward like an oversized package in her arms she dared not set down anywhere.
    Almost, you could see it—the bulky thing in her arms.
    Almost, you wanted to flee from her—the bulky thing in her arms was a terrible sight.
    I will do this , she said. I will begin .
    She’d never been “high” in her life. She’d never smoked marijuana—which her classmates had called pot, grass, dope . She’d been a good girl. She’d been a cautious girl. She’d been a reliable girl. In school she’d had many friends—the safe sort of friends. They hadn’t been careless, reckless, or stupid, and they’d impressed their influential elders. They’d never gotten high and they had passed into adulthood successfully and now it was their time to begin passing away .
    She thought, I will get high now. It will save me .
    The first time, she hadn’t needed to leave her house. Her sister’s younger daughter Kelsey came over with another girl and an older boy of about twenty, bony-faced, named Triste (Agnes thought this was the name: “Triste”), who’d provided the marijuana.
    Like this , they said. Hold the joint like this, inhale slowly, don’t exhale too fast, keep it in .
    They were edgy, loud-laughing. She had to suppose they were laughing at her.
    But not mean-laughing. She didn’t think so.
    Just, the situation was funny . Kids their age, kids who smoked dope, weren’t in school and weren’t obsessing about the future, to them the lives of their elders just naturally seemed funny .
    Kelsey wasn’t Agnes’s favorite niece. But the others—nieces, nephews—were away at college, or working.
    Kelsey was the one who hadn’t gone to college. Kelsey was the one who’d been in rehab for something much stronger than marijuana—OxyContin, maybe. And the girl’s friends had been arrested for drug possession. Her sister had said, Kelsey has broken my heart. But I can’t let her know .
    Agnes wasn’t thinking of this. Agnes was thinking, I am a widow, my heart has been broken. But I am still alive .
    Whatever the transaction was, how much the dope had actually cost, Agnes was paying, handing over bills to Triste who grunted, shoving them into his pocket. Agnes was feeling grateful, generous. Thinking how long it had been since young people had been in her house, how long even before her husband had died, how long since voices had been raised like this and she’d heard laughter.
    They’d seemed already high, entering her house. And soon there came another, older boy, in his mid-twenties perhaps, with a quasi-beard on his jutting jaw, in black T-shirt, much-laundered